


The Dancer from the Dance

by madamebadger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alien Culture, Character Study, Dancing, Family, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Quarians, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-18
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-09 10:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1979967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"</i> — William Butler Yeats</p><p>Six dances, twelve years, and Tali finds her way home.</p><p>Friendship and family; no pairings as such.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Trust

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure whether this needs a warning per se, but just in case: Tali grieving for her mother plays an important role in this story as a whole, so if you are likely to find that upsetting, you are hereby warned.

Every so often, Shepard brought them into port somewhere for a little bit of leave. At first Tali was confused by this—did Shepard want them all to actually _leave_? Was it some peculiar human custom to turn over your crew on a regular basis?—but finally it was Wrex who clued her in.

“She thinks you need to take a few hours and relax,” he said.

“Oh,” Tali said, no less baffled. “…Why?”

He laughed: the low, gravel-eating, rolling krogan laugh. “Because humans go to pieces if they work too long without a break. So do asari and salarians, and, I guess, turians.”

Tali stared at him. “Quarians do, too,” she said, spurred to frankness by sheer surprise. “But not after _this_ little time _._ ”

Wrex laughed again, then, longer than before. “Neither do krogans,” he said. “But don’t let Shepard know, huh? Or we’ll get less shore leave.”

“Uh huh,” she said, and Wrex patted her on the shoulder and told her to keep practicing with the shotgun.

But the third time they had ‘shore leave,’ Shepard edged up on her at the bar and said, “You don’t dance?”

Tali gave her drink a little shake. It was a rare bar that would do you a dextro drink in a sealed and sterile tube, and she hadn’t missed that Shepard had always edged them toward a bar that _would_. “I do,” she said, “but not like that.” She jerked her chin toward the people dancing on the strobe-lit dancefloor.

“Not one for the bump-and-grind, eh?” Shepard said. Tali gave her a sharp sideways look, but there was no mockery in Shepard’s gaze, only curiosity.

“We don’t dance as part of, uh… courtship,” Tali said, and then cringed at how prudish it sounded. But it was true. “Or at least, not like that. Maybe very privately, with someone you were already very close to, you might… I’m babbling.”

“Not at all.”

And again, that calm, quiet look, that said that Shepard wasn’t making fun of her in the slightest. Tali exhaled. “There are a lot of quarian dances, for various reasons and purposes, or for no purpose at all, but they aren’t the kind of thing that you’d… well… that you’d do in a bar. If quarians dance like that, it’s because they’ve picked it up on Pilgrimage. I mean, I’ve learned a few dances, but not… like that.”

Shepard put her head to one side and sipped her beer. Tali felt a brief, irrational spike of resentment, at the fact that Shepard could just order a beer and drink it, simple as that. No sterile capsules, no suit tubing, no worry, no risk. “Would you show me?” Shepard asked.

“…Show you what?”

“The dancing that you _do_ do?” Shepard smiled, then, her disarming smile. “You don’t have to. I don’t want to pressure you, I’m just curious. I would just like to see, if you’re willing.”

Part of her said, _don’t, you’ll be made fun of_. Even though she knew, even after just a few weeks, that Shepard wouldn’t make fun of her for something like this. Part of her said, _don’t, this isn’t the time or the place_.

But part of her wanted to show, to Shepard, to all these people, how a quarian could move. What it was for a quarian to dance. “All right,” she said.

She stepped back, settled herself with one foot forward and the other back, her weight on her back foot. Arched one hand above her head—

* * *

—Tali arches her arm above and raises her front foot, pointing her toes. She pivots on her back foot and sweeps her arms, but her thighs tangle and she stumbles, and she grunts with frustration. At ten years old, she’s growing fast enough that she can never be quite sure where her arms and legs even _are_.

Her mother catches her as she stumbles and rights her. “Almost, love,” she says. “Try again.”

Tali flops down on the embroidered duvet that serves as couch, bed, and carpet in their small quarters. “I’m no good,” she says.

“You’re fine,” her mother says, implacable.

“I’m _terrible_.”

“You aren’t.” Her mother folds her arms. In her own way, she’s as stubborn as Tali’s father. In some ways, she’s _more_ stubborn. “You don’t like it. And it doesn’t come naturally to you. But you’re not terrible.”

Tali rolls over and glares up at her. The facial expression is muted through her smoky faceplate, but the body language is clear enough. “Same thing.”

“It isn’t.” 

Tali pleats the duvet between her fingers. “I keep trying and trying and my arms are too long and my legs are wrong—”

“You’re growing fast, that’s all,” her mother says. She sits down at the edge of the duvet. Though Tali can’t feel the warmth of her touch when she strokes her back, she can feel the pressure, and it’s soothing. “I remember when I was your age, I felt like I was all arms and legs.”

Tali plucks at the coverlet. “I’m never going to be good at it.”

“You will if you practice. Tali, love, you’ve been lucky. You’re good at math and you’re good at the logic problems your father gives you. And you’re good at history and literature and law, and you’re very good indeed at programming. You like those things because they come easy to you. You don’t like dance because you have to actually work at it.”

Tali rolls over, onto her back. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t leave it to the people who it _does_ come easy to.”

“Because it’s good for you to work at things that aren’t easy for you, sweetness,” her mother says, stroking the edge of her mask, a touch that Tali can almost, almost feel. “At some point you will find things that are not as easy that you still want to do. It’s good to learn to put the effort in, so you can learn how to do them.”

“What did you have to learn to do?” Tali asks—still determined to be grumpy.

“I was terrible at biochem,” her mother says.

“But—”

“—but that’s a basic skill for a doctor-engineer,” she agrees, “yes, I know. And I wanted so badly to be a doctor-engineer. So I worked and worked and worked. It didn’t come easy to me, but I worked, and I got it.” Her mother pauses, tracing the patterns of the embroidery on Tali’s shoulder. “Do you know what your father was terrible at?”

“No,” Tali said. This is of particular interest. Her mother has always been open to her, generous with her history, her joys and fears, her frailties and strengths, her secrets. Her father… has not. “What?”

“Your father was a terrible leader.” Tali snorts with laughter, and she can see from the curve of her eyes that her mother is matching the expression. “It’s probably bad of me to say so, but it’s true. You know he’s not very good with people.”

“He’s an Admiral!”

“But he’s not very good with people.” Tali hesitates, then nods; her mother is not wrong. “He knew that, too. You know, when he was first courting me, he was terrible at it.” That startles a laugh out of Tali, and her mother matches it. Then she sighs, slipping an arm around Tali. “But he practiced—leadership, I mean, not courting me—and he banged his head against it until he figured it out. It was natural skill that made him a genius engineer and a brilliant tactician. It was determined practice that made him a good leader.” And then she taps Tali on the shoulder. “Just like practice will make you at least a decent dancer.”

Tali groans and rolls to her feet. “I don’t see why—”

“Because it’s a part of who we are. It’s part of being a quarian. And you’re entirely capable of learning it.” She gets to her feet. “Like this.” She arches her arm above her head and raises one foot, then pivots and sweeps her arm, bending her spine—

* * *

—and Tali let her head fall backwards, pointing her toes and lifting her foot high, then dropping it and sweeping the other leg in an arch. She planted both feet and spread her arms wide, her body stretched in a long arc from the tips of her toes on the ground to the tips of her fingers high in the air.

Shepard applauded, quick and loud, and for a moment Tali felt her cheeks heat—was that mockery?—before she realized _of course not, Shepard wouldn’t laugh at you like that_. So she bowed, briefly, a little bit self-deprecatingly.

“That was lovely,” Shepard said. “What was it?”

“It’s part of a traditional dance. It’s a—I guess you would say it’s a story-dance, retelling an old myth, the creation story. That bit was called ‘The Arch of the Starry Sky,’ or at least it was the simplified form of it.”

“Simplified?”

“A real dancer would do it with a lot more flair. And of course, they could do the whole dance—I only know a few parts, not the whole thing. The whole dance is how the endless void of the sky gave birth to the great enclosed garden—Rannoch—and then at the heart of the garden was born the first quarian, Rayya, the mother of all.”

Shepard’s eyebrows lifted. “Rayya?”

Tali smiled, even though she knew Shepard couldn’t see it. “Not an accident. All three liveships are named after important mythological figures—mother goddesses, I suppose. Rayya, who gave birth to all. Shellen, who made the desert bloom. Nirrizh, the dancer from the heart of the sea.”

“I guess,” Shepard said, “it isn’t that different than calling a planet Eden Prime. Which is also a mythological reference.”

“I suppose so,” Tali said.


	2. Loss

Afterlife was not exactly Tali’s kind of bar, but when the rest of the crew went, she went too. They actually did have drinks she could drink there, and Kasumi, in her own weirdly helpful way, always made sure she had one.

“Don’t dance much?” Kasumi asked, after a while—a while that Tali spent sipping her drink by the bar.

“No,” Tali said, and then—her downfall—”well, not like that.”

“Like what, then?” Kasumi asked. Tali always felt oddly at home with Kasumi. She was human, yes, of course… but between her deep, face-concealing hood and her catsuit, she looked more like a quarian than any non-quarian Tali had ever seen. And she was private and secretive and yet loyal, and that was like a quarian, too.

“We dance more…” Tali hesitated. “In groups. For marriages or naming-days or suit-ceremonies or funerals, whole families or groups of friends…” She spluttered and then jerked her chin toward the dance floor. “Not like that.”

_That_ was a pair of asari folding themselves around a pole. It was probably pretty appealing if you were into that, Tali thought, but it was less _dancing_ and more a sex act performed alone, on stage, while clothed. Well, mostly clothed. Partly clothed…?

She could see the curve of Kasumi’s lips, tilting into a grin. “All right, fair enough,” she said. “But it seems a real waste. I think you could be a great dancer. Here.” She grabbed Tali’s hands, so fast Tali couldn’t even object. “Just hold still, and feel the rhythm of the music.

Tali closed her eyes, and felt the rhythm through her feet—

* * *

—you can always feel the rhythm of a quarian group dance, if you know how to read it. Quarians dancing a wedding or a naming or a suit-celebration stamp their feet, turn and spin, tap their toes, thump their heels in a certain rhythm. If you know how to read it, even if you aren’t close enough to the family to be invited, you can feel the vibrations through the floors and walls of the starship. Countless days Tali, studying calculus or biochemistry or circuit design, has felt the thrumming of a score of quarian feet through the floors and known that there was a wedding or a naming being celebrated.

Or a funeral.

Today it is a funeral. Her mother’s.

There are many people attending, almost more than the small space can accommodate, because her mother was much loved. Doctor-engineers are often much loved but her mother especially so, because she was warm-hearted and sweet-tempered and kind (and Tali aches to think of the gentle voice she will never again hear, the touch in passing on her shoulder, the laughter), and so there are almost more arraying themselves around the plinth than will fit in the cramped room. There is her father by her side, and Han’Gerrel her father’s best friend, and Shala’Raan her mother’s best friend, and Dhana’Raan her almost-cousin and dearest friend, and Enne’Zher who they have so often had to dinner, and Reshe’Ikho, and Len’Vahl, and Arzhi’Vahn, and, and, and, and….

Tali stands shoulder-to-shoulder between her father and Aunt Raan, and she is glad, for once, of the faceplate of her helmet, because as long as she is quiet she can weep without anyone knowing.

The ancient quarians laid their dead out on a plinth and the dance was performed around it. Modern quarians cremate their dead almost immediately—a dead body is too much of an infection risk to tolerate for more than a few minutes. (Tali has already spread her mother’s ashes in the Rayya’s precious gardens. This tradition keeps the beloved dead close always… and ensures that the minerals and elements in their bodies will not go to waste. Pragmatism, always, is the watchword of the Migrant Fleet.) Instead, the plinth holds her mother’s finest suit-wraps, long winding strips of lavender and cream and charcoal, decorated with embroidery and jacquard, threaded with jet and gold. Set among them is her lavender faceplate, polished to jewel brightness by Tali’s own hand. They are more characteristic to those who knew her than any body might be, because so few ever saw her bare face.

There is a spray of flowers in the center: real flowers, cut fresh from the Rayya’s spartan gardens this morning. Flowers are a luxury beyond comprehending to Tali, and it makes tears burn in her eyes to know that someone—some patient, most likely, someone who her mother tended to—cared enough to have them delivered.

When a group of quarians dance a wedding or a naming or a suit-celebration, there is music to go with it, and the musician or the singer starts the rhythm. But funeral dances are not accompanied by any music, and so must be the dancers who begin it.

Because it is her mother’s funeral, it is Tali’s father—who stands to her left—who begins it.

The first tap of his foot, soft though it is, sounds as loud as a shotgun blast. But Tali knows enough to match it, another tap, and a turn, and a double stomp of her feet, and another turn, arm lifted—

It is her mother who taught her this dance, and that is the worst misery of dancing it. Because she cannot but remember the teaching.

( _She never had trouble with the turn, the lift of the arms, the double tap of her toes and the thump of her heels… but then she had to turn back left and she always mistook it and turned back right. The eighth time she did it wrong in a row, in her practice, her mother almost fell off her stool laughing. “Tali, sweetness, you know I love you dearly, but if you turn the wrong way and bang into some poor mourner, I must tell you now, I will probably laugh. I am sorry. I won’t be able to help it.” And made_ such _a face at her mother, even knowing she wouldn’t see it._ )

Now she turns, raises her arms, taps her toes—one two, quick and light, as is proper—and thumps her heel in rhythm with the others, to make the pattern of the dance in the silence of the hall, where her mother’s scarves lay in silence at the center. And then, without hesitation, she turns to the left.

She could not do it wrong. Not for her mother. But also, not next to her father. If she turns the wrong way beside her father, she knows that it will be like striking an iron bar.

She knows, even then, that this is a turning point for her father. Rael’Zorah has always been a difficult father to have. He expects much; he demands much; he is all requirement and little give. But there was a heart of softness in him when he was with her mother, and she thinks now that that softness has died with her.

(She will realize, later, that this is the last time she has ever seen him fully _present_ for anything except the dissection of geth parts. It is as though her mother was the caretaker of the part of him that loved something other than duty, and when she died, it died with her.)

She turns, perfectly in time; she taps her heel twice, her opposite toes once; she feels the sound of it ringing in her body and her heart—

* * *

—and Tali opened her eyes, and smiled—banished the lump in her throat at the old, old sorrow. One thing that quarians were good at was focusing on life, because death was ever so close at hand. So she said, “All right, teach me.”

Kasumi smiled, the curve of her lips beneath her hood, the shimmer of her hips beneath her tight bodysuit. “All right, then, let’s go.”

She led Tali out onto the dance floor, towing her by one hand. “Here,” she said. “You have great hips.” Tali paused, and Kasumi laughed. “Don’t worry, my interest is strictly aesthetic, I’m more into abs and biceps. But it’s true. Just feel the beat of the music and move with it.”

“I don’t know,” Tali said, but… yes, she could feel the music, a rhythm that started in her feet and slid up her legs to her spine, showed her wordlessly how to move with it. Maybe it wasn’t so different after all, feeling this alien music that spelled not wedding and not funeral but something else altogether.

“There you go,” Kasumi said, joining in, dancing in a slinky way that entirely suited her. “You’ll turn heads.”

“I don’t know if I like that idea.”

“Well,” Kasumi said, all feline smirk: “either way, get used to it.”


	3. Hope

Anderson’s apartment nearly made Tali’s eyes bulge, even after so much time among aliens. She’d known that non-quarians lived in much larger quarters on average, and she’d thought that the comparative wealth of space on the Normandy had accustomed her to it. But this was….

“Are all human homes like this?” she’d asked, unable to quite hide how awed she felt.

Shepard had laughed. “No. This is unusual. I can’t even keep track of how many bedrooms there are. It’s because he was the ambassador—there’s an expectation of keeping up appearances.”

That much, Tali could understand; admirals got larger quarters for much the same reason. But there was ‘larger quarters’ (she’d always a single private room a shocking excess for just herself and her father), and then there was… this.

She spent the first half of the party getting happily lost amid hallways, rooms, more hallways, balconies, and more rooms. (Admittedly, the fact that she’d had two of Garrus’ questionable dextro mixed drinks—carefully loaded into a sterile drink tube for her, a touch of thoughtfulness that Garrus would never admit to out loud—didn’t help with her pathfinding abilities. But it _did_ leave her feeling pleasantly buzzy.) After a while she ended up at one of the big windows, gazing out over the Citadel’s skyscape.

A few minutes later, Garrus joined her. They watched the “sunset” and the glow of passing aircars in companionable silence before he said, “You look too thoughtful for a party.”

“I was just realizing,” she said. “We met here, two—I guess almost three years ago now. Well, not here, but _here_.” She waved a hand at their impressive view of the Citadel.

Garrus chuckled. “I remember.”

She glanced sideways at him. “You thought I was a vagrant suit rat who didn’t know what she was getting into.”

He smirked, mandibles dropping. “And you thought I was an arrogant cop who wouldn’t admit when he was wrong about something.”

“And one of us,” Tali said, savoring the moment of finally getting one up on Garrus, “was right.”

He burst out laughing, which was exactly what she’d been going for. Then he turned around, leaned his back against the railing. “It’s been a good few years, though.”

“Yes,” Tali said. “Granted, I think most sentient beings would think our idea of ‘a good few years’ was pathological bordering on insane.”

“They just don’t know what a good time looks like,” Garrus drawled. His mandibles flexed. Once, she’d found the expression unsettling, revealing as it did his rows of serrated fangs. Now she found it endearing, just as now Wrex’s rumbled half-serious threats made her smile instead of making her tense for a fight.

“Maybe so,” she said. “But if I never have to clean vorcha guts off my suit again, it will be too soon.”

He gave her a sidelong look. “Worse than husk guts?”

She had to think about that one. “Husks are gross, but vorcha guts are caustic.”

“This is why you should be a sniper instead. I am proud to say that I have no experience that would give me a reason to have an opinion on the comparative disgustingness of husk versus vorcha guts.”

“It’s true, not everyone can handle the intensity of shotgun combat,” she said sweetly, and he laughed again.

“Come on,” Garrus said, “everyone’s dancing. That’s got to be more fun than making fun of me for an hour.”

“Says you,” Tali said, but let herself be drawn away from the windows—

* * *

—Tali paces the main room of the quarters she shares with her father, up one side and down the other. Three time she hesitates before the comm terminal; three times she doesn’t turn it on. Her omnitool will chime if there’s a message for her; staring at the empty list of unread messages will just depress her.

Her father has been distant enough these past few years that she shouldn’t be surprised, but still, some part of her clearly _was_ expecting something from him, because why would she ache like this if she didn’t? Some part of her obviously, obviously thought that he would come see her tonight, say—she doesn’t even know what, _something_ , some advice or wish for good luck on the eve of her Pilgrimage.

He’ll be there tomorrow, of course, when she goes. He won’t miss the formalities of bidding her goodbye. But for once she wants, for once she so desperately wants more than formalities from him. She wants something private, heartfelt, spontaneous, something that came from his heart and his gut rather than from his intellectual knowledge of what a father should do.

She’s so deep in her reverie that the door chime makes her start violently, and for a moment her heart thunders—and then quiets, because, _stupid_ , her father wouldn’t ring his own door. She swallows once and said, “Come in.”

The door hisses open to reveal Aunt Raan, dignified and lovely in her most formal suit-wraps. “Tali,” she says, her voice—as always—so gentle. “You shouldn’t spend your last night before the Pilgrimage shut up in your rooms alone.”

And looking at her Tali _knows_ that Aunt Raan knows why she’s there, knows she’s waiting for her father, knows it all. It was Aunt Raan who’d tried all these years to fill the place left by Tali’s mother. In retrospect, although she hadn’t always realized it at the time, it was Aunt Raan who encouraged her—gently, gently—not to expect too much from her father, her father who always seemed so removed ever since Mother died. And if Aunt Raan is here now most likely she knows why Tali is waiting… and if Aunt Raan is here now, it means that there’s no point in Tali waiting, because her father is going to work late into the night, as he always does, as if this isn’t his daughter’s last day of childhood on the Flotilla.

“I know,” she says, because it is all she knows to say, and sees her aunt’s eyes soften into sympathetic crescents behind the mask. “I just didn’t know where to—I mean—”

“My daughter and I are going see Fere’Hazhu dance the Birth of Rayya. You would be welcome.”

“There’s space for one more?” Tali says, automatically, because it is poor manners not to ask first if you’re going to displace someone.

“There’s space for one more,” Aunt Raan says. “You should come. It will be a memory to take with you when you go out among strangers.”

She spends that last night on the Rayya watching one of the Fleet’s most celebrated _shalia_ dancers, portraying with her arms and her body the story of the goddess-ancestor for whom the liveship had been named, sitting between Aunt Raan and her almost-cousin who is more like a sister, and if it isn’t perfect—if it is missing something, not someone but two someones, the mother who had once taught her these steps and the father who always held himself apart, still: it is enough—

* * *

—and everyone was dancing, or nearly everyone, in their own ways, even when their own ways meant that Jack was on a table and Grunt looked like he might break something (accidentally or on purpose) at any moment. Wrex leaned against a wall and watched like he was too old and jaded for all this, but Tali didn’t miss the way his foot was tapping. Kasumi popped in and out of visibility like some kind of smoke-spirit. Joker danced very carefully, and mostly leaning on EDI. Garrus and Shepard danced in sync, which is to say, both badly: and that was just right, too.

And Tali let herself feel the rhythm of Shepard’s terrible techno and danced, here and now. Danced, and felt the rhythm in her feet, a bright line drawn back through two Normandies and a dozen worlds, through the Citadel and to the fleet, to a child dancing with her mother. All the same rhythm, and all different. 

And perhaps they would all die saving the galaxy but for just a moment she felt that they, these people in this place, they might die but they _could not fail_ —and that, too, was enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title quote is from William Butler Yeats' _[Among School Children](http://poetry.about.com/od/poems/l/blyeatsamongchildren.htm)_.


End file.
